The automotive industry is increasing its effort towards scientific and technological innovations regarding autonomous vehicles. The expectation is a reduction of road accidents, which are too often caused by human errors. Moreover, technological solutions, such as connected autonomous vehicle platoons, are expected to help humans in emergency situations. In this context, safety and security issues do not yet have a satisfactory answer. In this paper, we address the domain of secure communication among vehicles – especially the issues related to authentication and authorization of inter-vehicular signals and services carrying safety commands. We propose a novel design methodology, where we take a contract-based approach for specifying safety, and combine it in the design flow with the use of the Arrowhead Framework to support security. Furthermore, we present the results through a demo, which employs model-based design for software implementation and the physical realization on autonomous model cars.

Model-based systems engineering is a discipline of systems engineering where a model forms the heart of all the systems engineering activities and is the basis of many of the project artefacts. Systems modelling is no longer viewed as simply a `good idea' but is, however, increasingly become an essential part of any systems engineering project. Indeed, this is the start point for the EU FP7 project known as COMPASS (Comprehensive Modelling for Advanced Systems of Systems) that has funded this research. The application of model-based systems engineering is becoming well understood at the systems level, however, there is a lack of research and subsequent industrial application at the system of systems (SoS) level. The main aim of the COMPASS project is to provide an approach for SoS including: processes, tools and new modelling techniques. This paper discusses how a model-based systems engineering approach was developed for requirements engineering that could be applied to both system of systems (SoS) and its constituent system (CS) level. This approach would meet the requirements of current best practice in system of systems in terms of established standards and research.

Autonomous and Adaptative Cyber-Physical Systems (ACPS) represent a new knowledge frontier of converging “nano-bio-info-cogno” technologies and applications. ACPS have the ability to integrate new ‘mutagenic’ technologies, i.e., technologies able to cause mutations in the society. Emerging approaches, such as artificial intelligence techniques and deep learning, enable exponential speedups for supporting increasingly higher levels of autonomy and self-adaptation. In spite of this disruptive landscape, however, deployment and broader adoption of ACPS in safety-critical scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we address some challenges that are stretching the limits of ACPS safety engineering, including tightly related aspects such as ethics and resilience. We argue that a paradigm change is needed that includes the entire socio-technical aspects, including trustworthiness, responsibility, liability, as well as the ACPS ability to learn from past events, anticipate long-term threads and recover from unexpected behaviors.

This work reports on the experience arising from the master internship contract-based design tailored to safety issues for cyber-physical systems (CPS). The main educational goal is to confront the student with realistic mixed-critical smart CPS systems, using the railway domain and autonomous trains as a case study. The results show that, for this class of systems, education should transition from a 2D to a 3D modeling design space, which is much better suited to visualizing the evolution and the underlying properties of the system. We use contract-based design to properly deal with the integration and composition of heterogeneous components, where safety aspects require special attention. The main scientific and technical results concern the implementation of contract-based design in a 3D tool. Finally, we discuss the teaching methodology underlying the internship and the competences required to address the design of a (critical) CPS by the new generation of students.

In this paper we discuss the separation between attributes on functionality and on structure following an approach based on model driven engineering (MDE). We adopt a methodological approach based on correctness-by-construction for modeling high-integrity real-time embedded systems. We illustrate how this separation is implemented by a prototype, recently realized by our research team. Software reuse is incremented by using the prototype. This has been confirmed by the evaluation of two teams from major European space industry. We conclude our work by discussing some open problems.

Advances in individual robotic fields such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, large-scale and local trajectory planning, sensor data processing and mechatronics have allowed mobile robots to operate in more complex environments. However, these fields are usually investigated independently, resulting in a lack of cross-layer integration and synchronization that affect safety due to incompatible timing constraints and error handling of different components. In this paper, we propose an integrated contract-based robot navigation stack from sensors and actuators to abstract intelligence. This stack is resource-and safety-aware. It allows continuous operation of a mobile robot within a complex environment.